Sitepoint have another competition on the go. The winner gets a copy of the new book “Principles of Beautiful Web Design”. The competition involves using CSS to style some simple markup that serves as an advert for the book. Unfortunately the markup hooks available for use with CSS are somewhat lean. I’ve given it a shot, as have others. Why don’t you have a go – you have until the 6th of April to enter as many entries as you like. Happy coding!
You may already have an OpenID from one of the many providers, for example username.myopenid.com. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use your own domain name instead? Well you can! You may not actually host an identity provider capable of vouching for your ownership of your own domain, but you can always get username.myopenid.com to vouch for you.
This process is called delegation. You use your own domain name as your OpenID, but add some extra markup to the head element of your homepage that tells the relying party that you are delegating the responsibility of authentication to another server. The markup you need is:
This will tell the relying party, that it should instead visit username.myopenid.com. You will then authenticate to this delegate server. Once successful, by implication of having authenticated to the delegate server, you have also proved that you own the domain from which you were directed.
The link tags are used for OpenID 1.x server discovery, and the meta tag for OpenID 2.x server discover. In order to be as compatible with OpenID consumers as possible, you should use both link and meta elements.
Coming up in April is the inaugural Highland Fling conference. A meet up of web developers and designers aimed at getting the Scottish interweb community involved with some of the big names in web development. There are a number of speakers including Jeremy Keith. The day after the conference, Friday 06 April is Refresh Edinburgh. A more informal gathering where developers can discuss the state of the web with like-minded people. I will be there, and I hope as many other developers in Scotland as possible, who like me don’t often have a chance to meet and greet at conference-type-events, will be there too. See you there!
We sign up to more and more services online every day. This often involves remembering multiple, often similar (in the case of username1984, user_name_84 etc) usernames and passwords. A solution to this is so called single-sign on, whereby you use only a single identity such as a Microsoft Passport or a Yahoo! username. The problem with this solution is that you can find yourself tied in to one large company’s services.
If you already have a Microsoft Passport, you are unlikely to want to create a Yahoo! account to use their services as this would involve going through a sign up process, replicating friends lists and so on from one provider to the other etc. Besides, I don’t know about anyone else but I don’t like the idea of some large company controlling my identity: storing my username; hashed password and other details. It would be better if I could arbitrarily choose who controlled my identity, or even better, control it myself. This is where OpenID comes in. [Read more]
There are a number of things that I intend to do with this site eventually when I have some free time:
That’s something for me to be getting on with!
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Facebook says: Max What a way to wake up: Jo retching because Maggie our (long haired) cat has yet again managed to shit all over it's tail, dragging it round the house trying to get rid. Now I'm torn to shreds trying to bathe Maggie!
Some of the recent comments people have made.
